2. April, as I note in the video, saw THE TWENTIETH
ANNIVERSARY of the first episode of Space
Ghost Coast to Coast. Space Ghost
once complained, “Moltar and I are out here doing my damnedest to put on the
best talk show possible.” And so it is with Seavey/Perry
On Culture. (I guess you can call it SPOC, by the way.)

3. The inspiration for part of our video chat, about how an
apparent Muslim imam’s letter to Ultimate
Spider-Man (printed in issue #200) mistakenly referred to Spidey co-creator Steve Ditko as
deceased, was this
article. More important, perhaps -- and not mentioned at all in the video
-- is the fact that Amazing Spider-Man 2
is awful, a real throwback to perfunctory 90s superhero movies (whereas the
trailers for the new X-Men movie look great).

4. The biggest Marvel news of the month might come when Jack Kirby’s estate argues for partial
ownership of such characters in front of the Supreme Court on May 15. My
position, of course, is that a contract is a contract, no matter how rich
others got from your much-appreciated contribution. Use a better lawyer next
time or law and contract will just be replaced by rule-by-loudest-whining.

5. And if you felt a disturbance in the Force, as if a
million nerds cried out that everything they love was just destroyed, it might
have been that hardcore subset of Star
Wars fans who loved the “Expanded Universe” of novels, comics, and other
spin-off materials, which all just got declared non-canonical in order to give
J.J. Abrams a clean slate for next year’s Star Wars: Episode VII (rumored to be
called The Ancient Fear, but who
knows).

Everything from Superman to James Bond to Planet of the Apes
has been to some degree rebooted for the twenty-first century by now -- and it
may shock you to hear that this 80s-ophile is starting to feel at home here at
last.

On to politics:

6. Just to get more stuff done, I quit a total of five anarcho-capitalist Facebook pages in
which I was participating. Another participant in a few of them is off to sea
as a merchant marine after years of being an unashamed Aquaman fan. Yet another
will be living in NYC for a month. It seemed an apt time. However...

7. ...I was pleased to party with libertarians at the bar
Play (next door to the Museum of Sex) twice recently, once to mark the final
night of legal e-cigarettes use in
NYC before the insane and deadly ban on “vaping” in public venues goes into
effect, increasing the odds of at least some people avoiding harmless
e-cigarettes and sticking with their deadly conventional cigarettes, despite
the tragic and now easily avoidable toll of some 400,000 dead Americans per
year.

8. Even with our (now FBI-investigated) communist mayor
here, though, NYC may not yet be as left-wing as San Francisco, which has reached the point where Luddite hippies
launch anti-car, anti-search-engine protests against Google tech wizards, hell-bent
on dragging us back to the stone age in the name of Progressivism.

At least if they destroy the Internet completely, we won’t
have to see daily evidence of how rapidly-proliferating subcultures are coming
up with innovative new ways of being offended, as the rest of us cruelly fail
to pay sufficient honor to their status as transsexuals 3.0, animal-identifying
“otherkin,” or whatever comes next.

God forbid we should focus on more important things, like
whether Obama and the EU will cause World War III by sparring with Russia over
an ambiguous Ukraine.

9. Libertarians have their own endless internal squabbles,
too, of course. Apparently BleedingHeartLibertarians blogger Jason Brennan praised left-liberal Paul
Krugman over libertarian economist Murray Rothbard and then deleted his post in
cowardly fashion (h/t Stephan Kinsella). Brennan also reportedly once said
people should read his resume to confirm that “Rothbard isn’t even on my level.”

This sort of narcissistic, presumptuous,
make-up-our-own-reality display ought to be the end of the liberal-tarian Bleeding
Heart project once and for all, but in the meantime I’ll settle for enjoying
this essay (h/t Jesse Forgione) by John McCaskey, who, incredibly, taught
at Brown for a couple semesters yet has here written a great critique and
overview of classical liberalism’s rise
into libertarianism and tragic descent
into liberal-tarianism.

McCaskey sounds more Objectivist (and thus anti-altruism)
than I might like, but it’s nice to see someone taking the liberal-tarian academics
just seriously enough to see them as a threat to liberty.

10. If you want to know what I really think about all that,
for now you will have to ask me in person, by catching me in the audience in a
few hours at a Deroy Murdock speech
about the Democrats’ and the left’s long history of oppressing blacks (and
Republicans’ unsung history of fighting back).

1 comment:

I am roaming Kimmel, having got past the vigilance of Security (who did nothing while the Marxoids terrotized me for four years), and found the 8th floow occupied by "noncredit public relations" sessions. I was unable to give the name of the event I was looking for or the sponsoring organization, hence Security's obstruction.